Still not convinced you want to upgrade to Windows 8? Here's one more tempting reason t do so: Windows 8 can actually be a great Windows Home Server replacement. It offers most of the same features for sharing, storing, and protecting lots of data on your network.

We Got Served offers a complete guide to building a Windows 8 Home Server, from choosing the hardware and installing Windows 8 to managing user accounts and shared folders. Some features are exclusive, however, to the 360-page eBook, which costs £9.99, but you could probably figure those out yourself by looking up those Windows 8 features.

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If you're wondering what the differences are between Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows 8, there really aren't much. As Paul Thorrott notes on his SuperSite for Windows, Windows 8 offers data redundancy and pooling of drives into one larger storage pool, and it improves on WHS's storage system. Windows 8 also has great backup features, including file history and push button reset. Documents and media sharing is the same. The only thing that seems to be missing is network health monitoring and remote access (but Microsoft will be releasing a SkyDrive app that will solve the latter).